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Tennessee lacks central storehouse, formal recordkeeping on Does By ANSLEY HAMAN, hamana@knews.comMay 21, 2007
To Lee Meadows Jantz, the dead person's reconstructed face shown on the Internet did not reflect the features of a young white woman, as the Web site theorized.
Jantz, coordinator of the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center, believed the remains found floating in the Cumberland River in 1993 were actually those of another ethnicity. Further, she suspected the person's bones might be in the center's collection right here in Knoxville.
They were, and after a brief examination of the skeleton, she pegged it to be that of a black male, possibly 40 years old.
Jantz, who had seen the image on the Web site of a volunteer sleuthing group, contacted Nashville police with her findings. The remains are being analyzed at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification in connection with a January 1993 disappearance of a black man, said Detective David Achord with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.
"We've been missing him all these years," Jantz said.
The case highlights some of the pitfalls of connecting names with the remains of unidentified adults, Jantz said.
Tennessee operates a clearinghouse for children reported missing, and the federal government requires agencies to track them as well. But no one is required to look out for the bodies of missing or unidentified adults.
In fact, many of the state's unidentified bodies quickly become cold cases. They end up being buried, cremated, stored in medical examiners' morgues, or donated to Jantz's center. Information gets lost, and identifying them can be extremely difficult, she said.
"If a body doesn't get identified fairly quickly, it falls back in its level of importance, and that is simply a fact of lack of resources," Jantz said. There are four federal databases that amass DNA